Witchvox Article

Author: Hedgewytch
Posted: November 22nd. 2003
Times Viewed: 4,222

Once upon a time - okay, about six months ago - I was sitting outside a local music club with the club owner and a few of her friends, enjoying the evening air, as the booked gig played inside. The conversation turned to my singing and music writing, and how I missed it, since I had become so ill with a congenital syndrome. My club owner friend commented on a time when a guitarist I was working with - who had worked with Robert Plant, at several of those days-long charity shows, in England - had sent one of our band's tapes to Mr. Plant, and he had responded with a number of suggestions. One was that my voice should be more central, because there was a Kate Bush quality to it that he liked. And yes, at the time it happened, I was insufferably, godawfully smug about it, deeply needed to be slapped, and my friend and I were cracking jokes about how swelled my head had gotten when I heard that news - I said my ankles had only become pronated from the stress of carrying my ego around, and that sort of thing.

One of the fellows sitting nearby, who had obviously been informed that I was a Witch, asked us what we were laughing about, and when we told him, he greeted the anecdote with words to this effect: "Wow, cool! You must be really living right, to have that kind of stuff going on in your life!" He said this authoritatively, obviously with an eye to impressing me - the only thing he didn't do was actually pat me on the head, at which point I would have been forced to break one of the clay pots holding the patio's decorative plants over his head - and including some additional comments that were pretty much just a restatement of that. And he said it all with the aura of one saying - with some additional unmistakable references; this wasn't just paranoia on my part - "Look, see? I'm in the know! I know what a real Witch is!" Fortunately, I was saved the necessity of replying by the event of a friend of his exiting the club and gathering him up so the two of them could take their leave.

"Sorry about that," my friend said, when they were gone.

I shook my head with a smirk. "It happens."

On another occasion, some years ago. I was involved in a traffic accident that totaled out my car, though fortunately my passenger and I came out of it relatively unscathed. We'd been sitting at a stoplight, minding our own business, when a gigantic GMC pickup smashed into us from behind and threw us into the intersection. Thank karma, luck, the Gods, or whoever's in charge of traffic, but the lights were red to the only other cars waiting as well, so the intersection was empty. A bit later that week, a Witch acquaintance of mine, with whom I'd had a serious falling out - I'd met her through her husband, who was also Pagan and played guitar - sent me a vituperous letter, centering on the supposed connection between my being such a rotten person and my car being hit by a drunk driver. My congenital illnesses and my inability to keep a band lineup together were obviously, according to her, also connected to my innate karmic nastiness, and I'd better heed the warning the universe was sending me, etc. for about five pages, not that I read them all. (I let my roommate of the time read it, and he told me not to bother; she didn't say much of anything else in all that space.) Not being able to keep a consistent band lineup together, at least, might conceivably be connected with lousy people skills, but that wasn't the connection she was making. All my misfortune was due to the fact that I was sending out badness, and so I was receiving badness. The rule of three. Quid pro quo. Bad things happened to me; therefore I had done wrong and deserved them. It was entirely different when anything bad happened to her, of course. She was a helpless victim.

I could include more illustrative anecdotes - a lot of them, unfortunately - but the point is this: both non-Witches and some Witches/Wiccans/other Pagans are frequently laboring under the misapprehension that karma works on principles no different than those governing rats running a maze. Go the right way, get a food pellet. Go the wrong way, get an electric shock.

Many people have written on the topic of the dichotomy of evil - that doing good does not necessarily bring good on a person, and doing evil frequently goes completely unpunished, by the universe or anything else, at least as visibly related to the incident of evildoing in question. If God is all-powerful, and God is good, why does God allow evil to flourish and, seemingly, punish the righteous? Phyllis Curott makes mention of this in her book "Book of Shadows" which tells the story of her becoming a Wiccan initiate. Also, I've read, on the web, of Wiccan parents being at a loss to explain to their children why, when they do good, they do not always receive good, as the law of three indicates should happen.

That much isn't unreasonable. It's perfectly understandable for children to deal only in black and white, and to deal with things completely subjectively. They don't have the experience, or the broad-spectrum, adult viewpoint, that one needs to realize that this view of karma is an extreme oversimplification - one extreme enough to border on being some other philosophy entirely. It's only later that we humans mature enough to realize the world is simply not that way.

But in some people, that realization doesn't seem to happen. One reason for this, I believe, is the western world's tendency to divide everything into black and white, good guys and bad guys, and to see happenings in one's life as rewards or punishments. It's like our highest philosophy wouldn't be out of place in a low-budget feelgood movie. All three of the major religions of the west tell us that we must behave in accordance with the law as it is set out (in the Bible, the Torah, the Koran, etc.). If we do not, we will anger God, and we will be punished. Even if one doesn't belong to any of the religions in question, that attitude, that mentality, permeates everything we're exposed to as we grow and mature. After all, when we are "bad," we get punished, and we're rewarded when we are "good." The definitions of those two things are only this - how well, or how poorly, we obey our parents' (teachers', coaches', bosses', etc.) instructions and preferences. It's no wonder we get confused.

In addition, I often read that Wicca - in terms of the world's well-known and widespread religions/philosophies - is probably most closely related to Taoism; and most people who are not Taoists don't understand that the black and white portions of the T'ai Chi symbol do not represent good or evil, or male and female, or any dichotomy as we are used to thinking of such. Yes/no, right/wrong, and good/bad do not, practically speaking, exist in the optimal Taoist worldview, at least not in the way that most of us are used to thinking of such. Wu Chi was the state of total undifferentiation, and what Taoists seek in their own lives and in being an example for the world. Wang Chi was the state of differentiation that existed in the world after the most optimal state, Wu Chi; T'ai Chi is the state of the world now, differentiated, but with elements of the other embedded in the differentiated states of yin and yang. (I won't go further into Taoism, as I don't think I'm qualified, and Taoism per se isn't the main point of this essay; the point is simply that lack of any kind of differentiation or two-way polarity is seen as a part of the utopian ideal in Taoism.) The eastern religions are, in a way, both simpler and more complex than our major religions; but many of us don't want any complexity. We want what we were raised with. We want a code which will tell us what to do in any given circumstance - we want our religion to bear the responsibility for our choices, and we want to believe that if we try hard and "do what's right" we will not ever suffer unhappiness at the hands of the Gods or the universe. We don't want to have to deal with shades of grey. We don't like the apparently irreconcilable paradoxes adults have to deal with, and we want a nice, simple system of reward and punishment.

It's tempting. It's much easier to believe that we bring any badness we suffer on ourselves - as long as "we" is other people - so we don't have to feel like we have any responsibility to help the less fortunate. We don't want to have to contemplate the great unfairness inherent in life as being unfairness - we want both good and bad fortune to be deserved. If everyone suffering has done evil, then they brought this suffering on themselves. Even the slightly milder version of this idea - that what's happening to someone is something they chose to have happen, as a learning experience, for this lifetime - leaves us off the hook. We don't have to empathize with the person's (population's, species', ect.) suffering. We don't have to bestir ourselves to do anything to help. It's their learning experience, after all.

It's difficult to know where to begin to address this problem, because the first step to learning is absent in these people - most of them honestly do not want to learn anything else, do not want that simplicity taken away and replaced with the kind of uncertainty that forces people to deal with each situation as unique. And many of them will make no bones about admitting that they don't want it. I knew a person - who identified as a Witch - who was gravely offended at the idea of actually having to read books to learn about relevant philosophies. He wanted me to reduce deep and complex ideas and issues to sound bites, to explain the meaning of life in words of one syllable - to make it as simple as, for example, "Nice people go to heaven, bad people go to hell." Anyone who is at all familiar with the eastern philosophies in question - I'm not pretending to be all that familiar with them, but even I can see this - knows that this is impossible. So I would tell him something like - with reference to whichever philosophy or idea was being discussed - "At least read the book; then we can talk," and he would glare at me as though I'd told him to travel to Tibet and get everything straight from some ascetic perched atop a peak in the Himalayas. By his own assertion, it wasn't that he had a problem with reading. He just didn't see why he ought to have to. This man did not read for pleasure - and when he did read, he only scanned, a la Evelyn Wood speed-reading - nor did he ever turn off his TV. He expected everything to be as simplistic as what's seen on the boob tube (and I am not talking about the Discovery Channel), and he wasn't listening to any arguments about one's personal views of the writings being paramount over somebody else's interpretation, because that would have been, in his view, entirely too much work. He felt it was unreasonable to expect that of him. He wanted showmanship, and neat packaging - not philosophy.

Perhaps we could begin with the rule/law of three - what you send out, you receive back, threefold. I suppose the first thing to do would be to define our terms; so, what exactly is the "what" in "what you send out?" I recall a line - I think from Shakespeare, though I'm not sure; feel free to correct me if not - "Nothing is evil but thinking makes it so." It's as good a way as any to express the idea that good and evil are in the eye of the beholder. One person might be appalled by what another truly thinks is the "right" thing to do in a given circumstance.

So it seems we can't deal with good and evil as absolutes; we'll have to deal with them in terms of intent. Logically, if one follows the common mores of the west, the intent to "do harm" would be evil. The intent to "do good" would not be evil. Unfortunately "good" and "harm" are also in the eye of the beholder, and much of the greatest harm in the world has been done by people who were convinced that they were in the right and doing the morally correct thing. People are murdered, assaulted, cheated, and otherwise poorly done by with the mantle of self-assured "righteousness" as an excuse.

For example: I know a man whose mother believes that his being gay and his being Wiccan are absolutely, morally wrong, and that they are things of which he can be "cured." If she had the power, she would get into his brain's switchboard and alter these things about him, so that he would not be "bad" any more, and he would get to go to heaven. She would honestly believe she was doing him a favor in this. There are a million more examples of people deciding that the end justifies the means, and that a sovereign individual's rights may be ignored with impunity if the motives of the person making the changes are good - according to the person making the changes.

So, what would come back threefold on his mother? "Goodness?" Or a similar assault on the basis of her very self, her identity - three times worse? And "worse" in what way? And what event, or combination of events, would represent "three times" worse? It is impossible to determine these things in the framework of human subjectivity.

Every individual happening is, in its most fundamental form, an uncountable number of happenings; there is simply no escaping shades of grey. The notions of "fairness" and "good intent" are only something that humanity has invented to make it possible for us all to have some sort of common standard, so that we can get along well enough to do things like develop civilizations.

There are less basic, and more obvious, arguments. For instance, sometimes something happens to us that we hate - but, later on, it turns out to have been, in our opinion, a good thing: when my car was totaled, I ended up with another car that, while used, was newer and in better condition. Given the choice, though, I would never have gone through that accident. When my roommate got state housing and I had maybe two days' notice that she was leaving, my club owner friend found me a place near where she lives - so that she could help me in getting to the doctor and such - which had all the necessary amenities, and for a much lower rent than I would ever have been able to hope for if she had not caught the landlord right when he was remodeling and unsure as yet about how much he could reasonably increase rent on the place. The apartment became available just as my next month's rent would have been due, saving me from the impossibility of paying rent on two places to get it. I'd never choose to go through the stress of that time, even now, but I'm happier not living with the roommate in question any more, and I daresay she's happier, too.

And there's always the monkey's paw situation - something that seems too good to be true, and, unsurprisingly, turns out to be just that. To get one's heart's desire in life, and find one no longer desires it. Not all situations of good fortune are like this, of course. But "good" is still, and always will be, a subjective term. I grant you that it's sometimes a blatantly obvious subjective term, at least in human context, but it's still subjective.

What we need to emphasize, in thinking of karma and the threefold law, is the learning aspect of the events in our lives. Say, something bad happens to someone, and you have the power to help them, and you do so. The person you help has had a learning experience, and so have you. If you choose not to help them, you've both learned from that, as well. The main idea of karma and reincarnation (I'm not going to get into transmutation of the soul or we'll be here all week) is learning. Not learning better than to do/not do something, just learning. Not reward, not punishment. If it's true that we live many lifetimes on the road to ultimate self-realization, then any experience, enjoyable or unenjoyable, is there for the purpose of learning whatever we can learn from it, and the people around us learning what they can learn, and the integration of that knowledge into everyone's higher selves. If bad luck and bad happenings seem to dog a person, it means nothing in terms of whether that person "deserves" to suffer. It may, or may not, say something about their judgement, but nothing more than that. Does anyone blame starving, neglected children? Does anyone blame people who are otherwise powerless to help themselves? If not, where do we get the arrogant idea that we have the kind of perspective to decide who "should" suffer? Those who make such judgements must be quite sure that all the people who died on 9/11, every one of them, deserved it. You can't have a happening in your life much more horrible than that - so they must have been very evil people indeed? Is that the way it works?

If we assume we know what the thing to be learned is, in any given situation, we have, in the statistical universe, a snowball's chance of being correct, because the possibilities are endless, and incredibly subtle - much too subtle to point at and say "There, that's it. That's the karmic concern in this situation." That's simply following the programming of our upbringing, and our exposure to our society's blunt and unsubtle interpretations. Shrugging off the suffering of others because "they chose it" or "they brought it on themselves, it's karma because they've been bad" is inappropriate. Life, and learning, just aren't that simple. And it is never appropriate to sit comfortably in the middle of one's own fatuous complacency and pass judgement on others. You have no idea what this person may be learning, or not learning, from this experience, you have no idea what you yourself may need to learn via your knowledge of the problem, and you certainly have no reason to simply assume that it's "their own fault." The happenings in the lives of the people around us - all the people, human or not, with whom we share this planet - are part of our lives, and our learning, as well.

And if that isn't enough of an argument to satisfy those who are blithely enjoying their Pagan moral superiority, remember that it's in the largest three western patriarchal religions that western civilization began - on a large scale, I mean, speaking in terms of large populations - to pass most such judgements, after those religions came to serious social and political power. Birth defects, injuries, fires or floods or illness - almost any kind of misfortune was, and still is, used to judge other human beings as being punished by God, or possessed by demons, or whatever is convenient for accusers to say; and therefore those suffering are rightly to be made subject to an entire spectrum of atrocities, up to and including pogrom. Saying someone has done evil because something bad happens to him is only another version of blaming the victim. "So she got herself raped, eh? Well, she was walking home alone in the dark. She should've known better." "She chose it as a learning experience for this lifetime. It wasn't my place to intervene." Is that our precious "An' it harm none" moral superiority?

Karma is about all of us as a group; not only as individuals; and, frequently, what seems on the surface to be the major issue is only a vehicle for learning something that's impossible to see at the time it happens. Don't make the mistake of thinking you necessarily know everything, in terms of learning, about a given situation. When you make your choices, be aware that there are choices, and that they're your choices, and that you are responsible for them. This is not a stance of victim-blaming. It's a stance of empowerment. We do not always make the right choices. We do not always do the "right" thing. We are human, not Gods. And we do not have the moral superiority needed to accurately judge any of our brothers and sisters in the race. But as I said before, sadly, some people do indeed think that they have this superiority, and these people are very, very dangerous indeed. One does not need to be laboring under maniacal egomania to begin to believe oneself above it all.

Someone once said that one test of intellectual maturity is the ability to hold two conflicting ideas in one's mind at the same time. Sometimes we are given Hobson's choice, but that doesn't mean that what we choose to do isn't still our responsibility. That sounds like a logical paradox, and perhaps it is, but the way to handle it is this - forget about scrambling madly about, looking for somewhere to place blame (looking for root causes is not the same as blame-laying). Lao Tsu said "When you blame others, there is no end to the blame." That isn't always fair, definitely it isn't, and I'll be the first and loudest to say so when something unpleasant that I don't feel I deserve happens to me. But I can't honestly say it's untrue, either. It's an ideal - something to be striven for, whether we make it there or not. (Just like "Harm none." It's impossible to exist as anything living other than a photosynthetic plant and actually "harm none.") In fact, if we did make it to the ideal, we'd have to come up with a new goal, a new ideal, to continue developing, both as individuals and as a species.

But, much as I would dearly love to - hey, I ain't Jesus, pardon the expression, and I still sometimes catch myself petting an ego the size of a woolly mammoth - I'm not going to try to tell people that I'm infallible, or that they're just taking a slide, or any of that stuff - not until I can say with a straight face that I'm always right. Yeah, I know - better grab a Snickers bar. I know how pedantic all this sounds, but believe it or not, there are people out there who go to bed every night easy in the knowledge that they have never done anything wrong, and, to us mere humans, this is a truly frightening thing in the world, that kind of total self-certainty. I admire people who have beliefs and adhere to them; but people who have no questions and no concerns over questions of right and wrong in their lives and actions scare the hell out of me.

So, here's one more quote, and I'll leave you alone, I promise. "The doors of truth are guarded by Paradox and Confusion. Turn your back on these, and the truth will remain closed behind you." - Sarek of Vulcan.

Interesting folks, those Vulcans. Of course, they're (as in their writers, of course) the ones who came up with "Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations" - not the idea, but the particular phrase. They decorate their greatest minds and achievers with the phrase's symbol. It's the symbol I use on my altar as my God/Goddess figure, because of that meaning, not because of any resemblance to genitalia, for God's sake. But it's still okay to laugh, if you want.

Wishing everyone Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations,

Obsidian/Blue Champagne

ABOUT...

Hedgewytch

Location: Ponce de Leon, Florida

Author's Profile: To learn more about Hedgewytch - Click HERE

Bio: Obsidian (Craft name)/Blue Champagne (general web name) has been a practicing solitary for about fifteen years, is currently trying to find people in her new area (Seattle/Tacoma) to practice with, and her interests and activities include music (playing and writing), and story writing. She is, for lack of a better term, bi, but is not involved with anyone currently. She enjoys and writes basic ritual formulae for those with an eye to the pangender style of practice, rather than the bipolar view, which she sees as complicating things unnecessarily. She has a congenital CNS syndrome which interferes with her ability to work money jobs or reliably priestess to others, but she is always willing to share views or have ceremonies/rituals with other Witches. She can be contacted at the email address above.

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